Wednesday, September 05, 2012

The following op-ed was offered to the Norwegian newspapers Aftenposten, Dagbladet and Adresseavisen, all of whom rejected it. Adresseavisen believes that the text is no longer relevant. It has therefore been published online at the blog Snaphanen.

Many thanks to our Norwegian correspondent The Observer for translating the Norwegian text, which was then edited by Fjordman.

The mass media’s verdict?by Peder Jensen a.k.a. Fjordman

I have abstained from making any firm conclusions regarding Anders Behring Breivik’s sanity, given that I have never met him and due to the fact that he genuinely appears to represent a complicated and very special case. He is obviously twisted, but this does not automatically mean that one is unable to comprehend the consequences of one’s actions. No matter what label you put on him, however, he is atypical. Breivik is abnormal even among the abnormal.

The calculated and cynical way in which he planned and carried out his attacks speaks clearly in favor of sanity, but the case is not entirely straightforward. There are those who think that Breivik should be judged for his heinous crimes in a normal manner, but who are nevertheless left with a bad taste in the mouth as to how the verdict came about.

It is hard to escape the feeling that the sentence was formulated under an exceptionally intense and relentless pressure from the mass media on all the parties involved that had a significant and perhaps decisive effect on the outcome of the trial.

Oslo District Court spent several months on a case where the perpetrator had already confessed, and it was 100% certain that he had committed the crimes he was charged with, plus an additional two months to reach a verdict.

Despite this lengthy process the court spent relatively little time analyzing Breivik’s so-called manifesto. The first parts of his compendium, which is absurdly long and extremely poorly edited, contains hundreds of pages of quotes from Wikipedia and an array of writers such as Robert Spencer, Bat Yeor, Daniel Pipes and myself. Seen in isolation, many of these texts appear logically coherent, but that’s only because Breivik didn’t write them.

Part number 3, however, is dramatically different, and without a doubt the section which is most clearly shaped by Breivik’s own confused mind. It mirrors, among other things, his unusually strong fascination with violence and may therefore provide us with an important insight into his psyche prior to the attacks.

He there presents himself as “judge, jury and executioner.” There are several possible sources for this phrase, but one of the most likely in Breivik’s case is the cartoon character Judge Dredd. If this is correct, it means that Breivik identified himself with a cartoon character just as fictional as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Some of the rituals he describes for the alleged terror network Knights Templar are strikingly similar to what can be found in certain mediocre computer games, or in comic books of the “Conan the Barbarian” type. Add his own personally designed uniform with its bizarre fictional medals to the equation, and Breivik comes across as rather comical. In the next breath however, he describes monstrous violent fantasies and elaborates on how KT is going to detonate electromagnetic pulse weapons over European cities and blow up nuclear reactors in 2025.

The judges wrote in their verdict that they do not believe in the existence of the Knights Templar, but that Breivik could have maintained the existence of this network in order to generate fear. This is conceivable. However, the problem with this hypothesis is that when you read the third part of his manifesto, it is obvious that he relates strongly to the things he writes about there. He is noticeably less passionate when discussing various ideologies, as opposed to when talking about killing people, as the psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim noted.There are things contained in part 3 of the manifesto that are more or less unknown even among the angriest and most obscure websites on the Internet, including descriptions of thoughts that are so outrageous that not even most genuine neo-Nazis present would anything similar. Breivik compares himself with Saint George, the patron saint of England, and suggests in utter seriousness that he may be declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church as a direct result of his massacre.

In their unanimous court ruling, judges Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen and Arne Lyng plus lay judges Ernst Henning Eielsen, Diana Patricia Fynbo and Anne Elisabeth Wisløff claimed that Breivik can be identified with a subculture that is “hostile to Islam and right-wing extremist,” which they repeatedly presented as being virtually the same thing, although they emphasized that others did not support his massacre.

This would indirectly include many of those who was cited in the earlier parts of the manifesto, such as Robert Spencer, founder of the website Jihad Watch and the author of several best-selling books, the historian Daniel Pipes, who has a doctorate from Harvard University, as well as the physician and historian Andrew G. Bostom.

Breivik compared himself with cartoon characters, was convinced that he will be declared a saint for shooting fifteen-year-old girls in the head, and fantasized about becoming king at the same time as his imaginary friends would blow up dozens of nuclear reactors. This could possibly be classified as bizarre delusions, but the judges suggested that such ideas are not uncommon among Islam-critics on the political Right.

The court’s verdict refers uncritically to so-called expert witnesses like Lars Gule and Øyvind Strømmen, who has built his career solely by looking for scary anti-Islamists under every bed. Breivik has stated that he wanted to copy Islamic Jihadist terrorists. The radical left-wing witness Mattias Gardell has cooperated openly with representatives of Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization of precisely the type that Breivik admires. Yet despite this, Gardell didn’t receive a single critical question from the court regarding this issue. Instead he was portrayed by the court only as being a neutral academic expert.

In stark contrast to the above, during the trial the judges publicly suggested that other witnesses such as the immigration-critical scholar Ole Jørgen Anfindsen belonged to the same “right-wing extremist environment” as the mass murderer. The political bias was painfully obvious in that case.

The Norwegian press were unanimous that the verdict in the Breivik case was “courageous.” The judges caved in to the pressure from one of the biggest bullying campaigns in the country’s history, where the mob was led by the editors of news outlets NRK, VG and Dagbladet. The court ignored established jurisprudence surrounding the question of doubt, gave the political establishment and the mass media the verdict they had demanded in advance and also implicated the preferred scapegoats. One can possibly assert that following the path of least resistance is brave, but this does not necessarily mean that the assertion is true.

For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.

3
comments:

The original psychological forensic observation concluded that he was absolutely schizophrenic.

The second evaluation is highly suspect because it was made in responce to public and political pressure.

Brievik started his descent into madness as far back as his highschool years - and his biography presented in the original observation mirrors that of countless other schizophrenics.

As to his ability to function:

Schizophrenia isn't like an on off switch. You don't go from fully functional to stark raving mad overnight.

It is quite common for it to be a gradual decline over years.One can also live for years with Schizotypal Personality Disorder, in which one can function, but has extremely eccentric beliefs, manner of speech and ways of moving. SPD often develops into schizophrenia.

The police and lawyers remarked on television how extremely strange his speech and general way of moving was. This indicated he had been at least mildly off for years.

Being in a state of SPD that was in the process of becoming full blown schizophrenia would explain Mr. Brievik's ability to function while his judgment had been completely obliterated.

FURTHERMORE schizophrenics develop obsessions with order and purity because thier inner lives have become confusing and out of their control.

Because they can't control their own thoughts they can't even see that it is they themselves that are the sourse of their anxiety. So they externalize the source of their discomfort onto imagnined conspiracies.

It's quite like how everything in a dream is really a reference to ourselves.

If the conspiracy is defeated then "order" and "purity" will be achieved. But it's only ever the order and purity of their inner lives that they wish to achieve. To be cured.

The purity of his country was really an externaization of the desire for purity and order within his own mind.

This was Mr. Brievik's real motivation and his ONLY motivation.

He would have developed an obsession about anything that "rang true" to his inner emotional life. It's only blind chance that it was this issue in particular he fixated on.

And don't forget. This supposedly sane person had to be on massive amounts of psychiatric medication just to attend court procedings.

First off, I go back to my original thesis, not so far disproved by anyone, though disagreed with by many:

This fellow is probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I think some 3-initial folks in residence at the US Embassy weaponized him. This fits in with our Sec. State's need to dig up lone-rightwing-white-extremists in order to prove the OIC's absurd talking point about the "real" terrorists. The 3-initial folks were just following orders.

After Wikileaks, those guys suddenly found themselves with an urgent need to leave Norway and ABB was either abandoned or left in the hands of the locals. My bet is on his being abandoned because they thought he was stupid and too caught up in his computer games to be a threat. They knew enough to feed him garbage about being the leader of a group of other undercover Knights. Thus, when he talked about "the others" he sounded delusional, but the idea didn't originate with him.

I'll leave off the other details since we've been there already.

However, I'll never ever believe the creeps-in-charge until someone does a forensic analysis of the so-called Manifesto. That thing contains way more info on American conservatives than even the most dedicated outsider could have uncovered all by his ownsome. There are "insider baseball" fingerprints all over that thing.

Norway doesn't want to know that. Look how doubly foolish they'd look if that came out. ----------------------------However, while the mass media in Norway may have led the circus surrounding ABB's trial, they were never in charge. They took their orders on which memes to push from the political elites who run EVERYTHING in the country: media, education, politics, etc. That's what makes Norway totalitarian.

For that same reason America is moving in a similar direction. We have far more room for dissent right now, but that space is becoming more constricted over time.

The recent creepy takedown & extremely effectiver exclusion of grassroots groups from the RNC at the GOP convention is sad proof of this shrinking room. We'll have to wait till after the election to see if the amputation was successful.

Takuan was right re his judgment of Reince Preibus (RNC Chair). just another GOP invertebrate.

Why would a Norwegian media want to publish such calm, nuanced investigative journalism by the tranditionalist Fjordman; it would take the joy out of their self-useful conclusions. They have their trump card and they plan to use it.